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Nvidia has been putting out ARM-based platforms for a few years now, but has yet to really leverage its graphical expertise on mobile platforms. The GeForce ultra-low voltage (ULV) GPUs packaged with the company’s Tegra chips have been about on-par with the Adreno and PowerVR, but that could change with the release of Nvidia’s next ARM chip. At a recent event, Nvidia had a newly optimized demo of the Tegra 5 chip (codenamed Logan) which will feature a Kepler-based GPU similar to the cores in desktop GTX 600 and 700 cards.

This isn’t the first time Logan silicon has been shown to the general public — that was back in July, but the development board and demo have been further refined since then. The dev kit for Logan is still quite massive, but the system-on-a-chip (SoC) itself will be smaller than a dime when it is complete and ready for use in phones and tablets. Even without stepping the architecture down a notch –Tegra 5 will still be 28nm — the GPU in Logan looks to be capable of some impressive feats.

Nvidia talked about a few numbers at the event, but the centerpiece of Logan’s coming out party was the Faceworks “Digital Ira” rendering test, which Nvidia has been working on for a few years. This is an advanced real-time engine that renders a realistic human face with proper reflections, lighting, skin textures, and expressions that almost succeed in vaulting the uncanny valley. We last saw Ira on Logan over the summer, but the engine had been scaled down for the debut — the skin shaders are simplified and the scene is only being drawn at 1080p.

As the Tegra 5 SoC continues to develop, Nvidia has been able to boost Ira’s shader passes to render more realistic textures (as seen below). Much of this is thanks to Nvidia’s GameWorks developer tools. Many of the top Tegra-optimized Android titles have been built with this software in recent years, and it has now been updated for Tegra 5 (and to show off Ira). Still, the Logan dev kit only pulls 2-3W of power to do all this — the final Tegra 5 for phones should run at about 1W whereas a Titan needs at least 250W.

In a tablet, Nvidia believes the beefier 2W version of Logan will be more powerful than the PS3 or the GeForce 8800 GTX — in the neighborhood of 400 GFLOPS. Granted, these are both a few years out of date, but we’re clearly into the realm of desktop-level graphics. These raw numbers put the mobile Kepler GPU at around 5.2x the power of the PowerVR SGX 554MP4 in the most recent iPad. At this level there is the potential for memory bandwidth to bottleneck performance, but the company has not yet commented on this.

Logan, with its Kepler GPU, will support OpenGL 4.3 and CUDA 5 out of the box, which could allow more realistic graphics, but also true general-purpose GPU computing on a mobile device. Logan is supposed to go into full production in early 2014 and reach devices in Q2. This will be Nvidia’s last 32-bit ARM SoC — the follow-up to Logan, currently codenamed Parker, is expected to implement Nvidia’s custom ARMv8 64-bit processing cores and the next-generation Maxwell GPU.

Tagged In

Very impressive… if this can be done, why can’t they achieve a perfectly smooth interface which should take a lot less power to achieve.

Dylan Moore

Yup. Real fucking tired of getting mouse lag on menus. Loading a million other things at once without a shred of inconsistency just makes me go “Well clearly it’s something that can be fixed, you’re just lazy.”

Matt Menezes

I wonder if mobile game devs will write games that will scale in order to take advantage of such a beefy GPU. I’m looking at the new Nexus 5 w/ Adreno 330, but Logan’s Kepler will trounce it.

GG Nvidia…

Dozerman

Don’t get me wrong, this is incredibly realistic, but I honestly find it hard to be impressed by this. They simply took all of the resources that would usually be used to create the entire game and put it into one thing. The GPU is only having to render one object in the scene, however complex it is. The background is just a blurry image, and not being rendered in real time from what I can tell. This is still YEARS away from being put into an actual game or simulation.

tbss

no.

Dozerman

Care to elaborate?

alexxx

I have this demo on my pc with gtx680, and it’s purpose is to demo what CAN be done, at certain level, with respect to the resources at any given frame…ooo, I get you now lol – I think you’re right, no, you are right because if we had a battle scene with many soldiers in a game for instance, then you would limit these effects and realism to scale with respect to the hardware power. They don’t show you the balance in this video. Good thing to take from it is that technologies are now available, like openGL4+, directX11 that they are showing off, as for scaling – it’s upto the wisdom of the developer I guess. This demo does drain the resources, and it is meant to be efficient so no background, focus is on face/skin. Hope that helps.

Dozerman

That’s exactly what I meant. In the time between me posting that and now, though, I have considered situations where this may be useful, such as a scene in a mobile game where two characters are talking to each other and the player is guiding one chartacter. Imagine a mobile game where you are captured and interrogated and have to resist interrogation. As the interrogator asked questions and the player entered responses for the character, the game would show each face and a blurred background.

Lag-Fighting Tactics

Xbone can’t even output 1080p!
And soc for a mobile phone can LMFA
@ budget gpu xboners who think 900p is now good enough,

PS4 50% more raw power and true 1080p gaming

Joe_HTH

Oh that’s strange. Forza 5 is full 1080 at a locked 60FPS with Vsync turned on. Most of EA’s sports titles are also full 1080p.

You’re talking out of your ass.

Lag-Fighting Tactics

Pre baked lighting where every race is 2pm in the afternoon.
No real time lighting or weather.
Xboners claim they now wouldn’t want weather effects or
real time lighting as pure racing in pefect conditions is better for fun.

And downgraded cardboard cut out crowds that are joke.

tbss

Even Gran Turismo 6 on the PS3 has time of day changes during races in real time. LOL @ Forza. PS4 and Xbox One versions of Witcher 3 will be both running at 30 fps though so it will be interesting to see the resolutions on both. My guess is 720P on Xbox and 900-1080P on PS4.

Lag-Fighting Tactics

Most are 720p because Kinect is collecting your viewing habits

patti livernash

my Aunty Anna got a six-month old Audi S8 by working off of a pc online. website link w­w­w.J­A­M­20.c­o­m

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